My Life Can't Be This Gacha

★★★★★ Raincoat said:

A transparent blue raincoat with bright red dice patterns along the edges of the sleeves and hood. The raincoat generates a spherical field entered on itself that strongly repels liquids and weakly repels wind.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

In the moment of weird no-going-back-now lucidity as the bright circle unfolds underneath the pile of stuff on your floor, you wonder if you should take the comforter back. It is pretty cold these days, with the wind and rain outside going at it hard enough that you don't even need the air-conditioning anymore.

But, you think, there are spares. A spare. Probably, if Pa and Ma didn't take it when they left. You don't remember if they took it. But the bright light engulfs the haphazard pile and fades away, leaving behind a blue poncho with bright red dice patches along its edges.

You pick it up. It feels nice. It's light, but strong, and it's transparent but not the kind of shiny that says "cheap plastic". And a poncho will come in handy when you leave the house.

(You look out the window. It's late morning, but it's as dark as night out there.)

If you leave the house, you decide. Right now you feel like a pack of Maggi with eggs.

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The rain keeps on going. Sometimes it lightens to a slight drizzle, or fine mist, and then you can see a dull yellow spot in the sky through the clouds. The rest of the time it feels like your house is the only one left in a hissing gray void.

It's when you're doing your laundry that you notice the miraculous nature of the new poncho.

(You've already modelled the new poncho for the 'gram, of course. You got thirty-two likes for it and three spambots in the DMs.)

The rain can hardly get near you before it gets slowed way down, hangs for a moment in the air near you, and then zips right back out away from you. The lashing wind turns into a very mild, gentle breeze. This also applies to the puddles of water on the floor, which scatter off to the edge around you as you walk so that you're walking in a sort of hula hoop of water. The repelled rain forms a filmy bubble around you, like one of those giant hamster balls you've seen on YouTube. You consider going out on the streets like this. It would, you feel certain, be very impressive and get a lot more than thirty-two Instagram likes.

"That's dumb, Amanda," you tell yourself. "Don't do dumb things, Amanda." You go to unload the washing machine and as you take each item out, the moisture rushes out of the clothing to join the filmy bubble surrounding you. So you have an armful of instantly dry laundry, though it's still wrinkled and cold. You hadn't considered that your powers (which you are quite resigned to thinking about, now) would be so useful in this way.

(A very quick check shows that this water-repelling effect doesn't extend to anything inside a bottle, even if the bottle is opened. Soy sauce doesn't flee at your approach, until you pour some of it out into a spoon. The same thing happens when you turn on the tap. So you won't be doing any cooking with the poncho on any time soon.)

That night you sleep badly. The spare comforter you found just doesn't smell right. It smells stored and dusty, unlike your comforter. You feel you should have used the spare comforter rather than your own one. It is also scratchy, and there is a thread loose that snags on your toe.

The next morning you drag it down to the living room to Febreeze and air it out. It still does not smell correct, but you'll have to put up with it until the weather warms up.

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Three days after the last response to your thread on r/PinkHair, you bump it for attention, making sure to tag u/flamingos_are_the_new_black since they were so helpful last time. And then, just to make sure they know you did your homework and aren't just bumping for attention or whatever, you ask for extra information on. Um. Not Wu Zetian because all the Shanxi papers are about her and if you ask he'll know you haven't been doing the reading properly. Not that there's a lot of women on the list for some reason. Uh. You go back through your search history, trawling through your recent Wikipedia pages. Oh there you go!

"…do you know anything more about Queen Pebajma?" you add to the end of your post. "Wikipedia hasn't got anything much." Which is at least partly because Pebatjma was all the way back in the 8th century B.C. and probably because they didn't really care a lot back then about where their queens came from as long as they came from… somewhere. But this one's particularly notable because of how Egyptian royalty tended to marry their relatives, while Pebatjma just seems to have come out of nowhere. "Or anybody else really, I'm wondering about what happened when they first got their pink hair." At this point you're just an "asking for my friend in Canada" away from exposing yourself, but again, throwaway.

You hit send.

Then, to not feel guilty about all the work that u/flamingos_are_the_new_black put into getting you all those links (but 90% of them aren't useful to you because you don't live in the Western Hemisphere), you do some other Googling instead.

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The first problem is that there are fifty acts per page on the official Attorney General's Chambers page and there are 17 pages. On the 17th page you find that acts 822 to 827 aren't yet uploaded. So that's only 821 acts to glance at and sort through. Luckily there is a search bar, because every database these days has one.

You key in hair. No results. Pink, colour, and (on a whim) rambut all also have no results. You frown. Environment. Yup, the National Environmental Act (entry 127). Of course the search bar wouldn't cover the contents of each act. That would be too useful. You'll have to filter it by hand and hope you guess right. Or open all 821 acts and search them all.

…honestly, maybe you'll just do that. There's time, and also you've had more tabs open than that before, that time when you'd newly discovered TVTropes. You sigh and get to right-clicking.

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You're somewhere into the mid-hundreds by afternoon, with no sign yet of any laws pertaining to pink-haired people. You've got a whole bunch of keywords to search for, because wouldn't it just be a pain to find nothing and realise it was because you hadn't been searching for whatever way it's referred to in the law? Also because you don't really reckon there's a law that says "if your child wakes up with pink hair one day, run away as soon as possible". But just in case.

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I Just Want a Normal Life Dammit is an anime about a girl, pink-haired from birth. She has parents. Maybe Japan has different laws. Or the studio just decided to have it that way, it's a work of fiction not a documentary dammit. And she doesn't have powers that consume her possessions to produce new, weirder possessions. Instead she gets a series of men and women throwing themselves at her. The first few are her neighbours and friends.

By episode five (which you watch while making dinner) she's the centre of a messy love dodacehadron featuring two warring ninja clans, a giant robot and its piloting AI, her childhood friends, and the mayor's daughter.

You skip ahead. The anime is four seasons long. The preview of every season has a more and more crowded cover. You sigh and settle in. You can't decide whether you'd rather have her "powers" or your own.

Magical Girl Godoka is even worse. You definitely don't want her life. Thank god your pink hair only kicked in when you turned eighteen. Fortunately the series is only 13 episodes long, though it's got three movie accompaniments and a mobile phone tie-in game. You bookmark the movies for watching.

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In between episodes of anime you open new tabs, search the law for anything pertaining to hair, children, pinkness, evacuation, or superpowers, and find nothing. In between that you check up on r/PinkHair. Your browser search bar is already autocompleting your address to that thread whenever you so much as type "r" into it. There's very little there to add on, but u/flamingos_are_the_new_black, rather apologetically, links you to the biography of Amelia Earhart instead of Queen Pebatjma. You'll have to buy it off of Amazon (at a terrible price!) because it's not yet freely available, though. Or hope that Popular or MPH carry it.

Your mind is made up for you when you check the fridge and realise there's almost nothing left to cook. You go shopping for groceries - remembering to find a cap to cover up at least most of your hair - and stop by the bookstores on the way. None of them carry it, but Popular has more manga with pink-haired protagonists. You buy the first collections of three different series.

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By the end of the week you have another 10-roll ready and very little to show for your time. The law has almost nothing about it. Come to think of it, it's also not like you got shown the legal codes of America or Britain or wherever - instead you got shown leaked files from the NSA, news and research articles, and the other megathread.

You suspect that - in Malaysian terms - whatever it is, has to do with the ISA(Internal Security Act) somehow. Not that Pa ever got mixed up with them! …that you know of. Hmmm.

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13 SPINS AVAILABLE!

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

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A/N: whoa, this update really got away from me. Quarantine does weird things to the brain. What day is it even? Do days even exist anymore?

Also. You guys voted for her to consume her comforter. Wow.

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Oof. Bad rolls all around. But knowing what doesn't work is the first step to knowing what does work. But there's always next week.

Actually, come to think of it, what did Pa do?
[ ] He was a government engineering consultant.
[ ] He helped run a minimart.
[ ] He was a Kemahiran Hidup(life skills) teacher.
[ ] He was a house painter.

And what will you do now? The rain is still going on, though you now have a ★★★★★ Raincoat to mitigate most of it. Still, going out with the ★★★★★ Raincoat will definitely reveal your supernatural powers… (Choose three actions for the coming week.)
[ ] New post: reveal yourself as one of the mythical pink-haired people and see what comes out. You'll probably be asked to provide pictures as proof, but it's easy to mosaic your face, right?
[ ] E-mail the author of some of those scholarly papers, telling them you have pink hair.
[ ] Go to a government hospital and tell them about your pink hair. In this weather??? Hahaha no.
- [ ] Call a hospital, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
- [ ] Call a police station, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
- [ ] Call a lawyer, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
[ ] There's a neighbourhood committee looking for volunteers to help distribute food to the older residents. Volunteer to do good deeds, even if it's uncomfortable.
- [ ] Go with the ★★★★★ Raincoat. If you got it, flaunt it.
- [ ] Use a spare umbrella. You'll get slightly wet but that's part of doing good deeds.
[ ] You really haven't seen another living being in too long. Socialise with:
- [ ] Era. (She's off at university, so you'll have to make do with video calls. Still better than nothing.)
- [ ] Ben.
- [ ] Che Din & Che Mat.
[ ] Attempt to find out more about the ISA's likely response to pink-haired people.
- [ ] The ISA response is likely to be similar to the British response. Look for news about the British… NSA equivalent…?
- [ ] You don't know what to do but you'll try anything. (Write-in strategy.)
[ ] Write-in. (Subject to QM veto.)

10-ROLL! Select at least three items to put in. Please select items that would plausibly exist in Amanda's home.
[ ] Write-in.
[ ] Write-in.
[ ] Write-in.

★★★★★ Fashionable Glasses said:

A pair of glasses with small oval lenses. The frame is green satin, with smoked blue-gray transition lenses. The glasses can be activated, enhancing Amanda's sense of temperature for up to an hour with higher sensitivity towards heat. Amanda can prematurely end the activation, which converts sources of heat (°C) in line-of-sight into sources of heat (Scoville) for the remainder of the duration. Once activated, the glasses cannot be reactivated for another two hours.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Your first thought, when you see the glasses left behind by the light, is: oh, god. Professor McGonagall glasses. And they are, too, in shape if not in colour. Still, they're really pretty. But they're super weird. You activate them and unsurprisingly the hottest things in the room are you and your computer. You end the activation and touch your computer.

It feels cold, in the sense of temperature. But touching it makes your fingers sting and burn like you've been handling chilli. Rather hot chilli, at that. And you can actually still feel the stinging radiate out from the computer. You grumble. That's one hour of Internet gone.

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The Magical Girl Godoka OVA runs in the background on the TV. It's the second time you're watching it. The fight scenes are really cool, okay? You just hope it doesn't mean you are going to end up in a fight like that. For one thing…

You start checking the other anime titles you have. I Just Want a Normal Life Dammit has fight scenes between the would-be haremites, but the protagonist does a lot of getting into trouble too. Magical Girl Godoka - well, 'nuff said. The same for the other save-the-world type plots. There's one, Lighter Than Pink, where there's a whole horde of pink-haired people with superpowers. And.

You wonder if you should've signed up for karate back in secondary school, instead of becoming a pengawas and ending up doing all that marching. If the anime or manga are any indication you'll just discover some weird mass of hidden talent if you try, anyway.

But there are no indications that the pink-haired people in real life have ever had to engage in intense quasi- or flat-out supernatural battles. Or none so far. And (you cling to a well-worn maxim) people are just too dumb as a species to keep on with a conspiracy this size. Especially in the age of the Internet.

Yeah. You're super unlikely to have to kamehameha your way out of a fight any time soon. That's good. None of the stuff you have would be useful for that anyway. Back to research.

The closest British equivalent to the ISA is their National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit - the NDEDIU. But it was formed in 2004! Way, way after Malaysia got out of it. So the ISA can't have come from there. Actually, come to think of it… the ISA only got enacted in 1960 anyway, three years after independence.

So maybe the ISA didn't come directly from Britain. Whatever, it was most likely still inspired by something similar. You do more searching. It's quite discouraging. The Malaysian ISA (and, to be honest, other police branches) have been very actively disappearing and murdering people. You're about 80% sure Altantuya wasn't pink-haired, after all. But searching for people disappearing in Britain just gets you lists of kidnap victims and heartfelt pleas by their friends and relatives.

People don't just… get disappeared by the police? Or by the uh MI6 or something? What does Britain even do? There's hardly any news. In fact all the current British news is about the general election and how terrible (or wonderful, depending on the website) it is that Johnson won. Nothing about pink-haired people in Britain.

Surely there's something! You just can't find anything about it online. No wait. You can. Totally did. You return to the post from u//flamingos_are_the_new_black. There it is. It's not a direct link, it's just a brief comment buried somewhere in the NSA leaks (because oh, wow, they were totally tapping the British embassies, is that even allowed), a phone transcript.

It's not very much. It's actually just a couple of lines of phone transcription, one person thanking the other for handling the Voy case, but the reply is interesting - "Oh, no trouble at all. He wasn't pink, you know." - and sends you right back to the British statistics, because the Voy case is one of those kidnapping cases, no apparent resolution, just occasional Facebook posts from his family.

That does not help much. It just tells you that the British people have something about pink people. And also that you're possibly maybe in danger of getting disappeared for no apparent reason.

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The new ★★★★★ Raincoat opens up new vistas of opportunity for you while closing off others. You could theoretically walk all over the neighbourhood now and never fear getting wet, but your Internet browsing has made you slightly paranoid. Slightly? Is it paranoia if they're really out to get you? You kind of think it doesn't matter as long as the ISA doesn't catch wind of you, but there's a lot of ways they could do that. A neighbour who sees you, for example.

Agh! Overthinking won't do anything. You throw the ★★★★★ Raincoat on and step out into the porch. It's heavy enough rain that you're all but invisible to anybody but the closest neighbours on each side anyway, and even if they see you they won't see you, just a hazy shape in the middle of a watery film. Good luck getting pictures through that! So you bravely bravely go all the way to the post-box and grab all the stuff inside it, feeling like there's eyes all over you as you do it even if there's no logical way they should be able to. You grit your teeth as the hairs on the back of your neck tingle, then turn and rush back into the house with your face on fire and your hands full of flyers and leaflets.

Most of them are the generic useless stuff. Real estate agents, home tutors, insurance salesmen, loan sharks. Some of them are bills, but there's already been a payment credited in and you can toss those aside without caring. What stands out to you are the shoddy leaflets. They're printed on A5 sheets that clearly used to be A4 sheets until they got ripped in half, probably with a ruler instead of scissors. They're black and white, with a bunch of clumsy hand-drawn hearts and sad faces around the borders. There's a wrinkly thing at the bottom that you can't figure out.

Then you read the leaflet. Oh. Neighbourhood food deliveries to the old people by a group called the Friendly Food Pandas, no relation to the actual FoodPanda. You hadn't thought the rain would be that bad for them, it's only been a bit over a week. But good karma is good karma, you suppose. Now that you've read the leaflet you realise the wrinkly thing on the bottom is probably supposed to be a smiling old woman in a panda suit (?) holding a lump of presumable food.

Well, you don't mind going out for a bit. You've spent way too much time on the Internet these past few weeks and it's making you unreasonably paranoid. You look up at the second storey of your house where you already pulled all the curtains closed (just in case). Yeah, going out would be a good idea. With the ★★★★★ Raincoat. And, uh.

Well, just in case.

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Beep beep-beep beep beep, BEEP BEEP goes Ben's car horn, audible all the way from your gate. You roll your eyes and press the button for the automatic gate for him to roll into your driveway.

"So? Go where?" he says, rolling the window down instead of getting out of the car. "Shopping?" Then he sees you in your bright blue raincoat with the bright red dice patterns. "Eh wah stylo Milo ah! But no need wear like that what!"

Okay, maybe you had deliberately not told him why to come over for lunch. And it is for lunch! Technically.

You hold out to him an umbrella, and his face scrunches up into a puzzled frown. "Amandaaaa…"

"Beeeeeeeeeeeen…" you say, mimicking his tone. "Come come it's for your own good!"

He rolls up the window and throws the gear into reverse. You fix your smile on him and press the button to close the automatic gate. He pitches forward and smacks his forehead into the steering wheel. "You never tell me anything," he says accusatorily, switching off the car and getting out. "Thought you say want to go lunch some more."

"Yeah," you say. "Do good deeds first. Then lunch." When he makes a face, you add, "Eh I belanja(treat) okay?"

"Yay!" he says, suddenly much more enthusiastic.

Then he gets even more enthusiastic when you've locked the door and pulled him out of the little side gate. "How?" he says, when his umbrella is made completely redundant by the powers of your ★★★★★ Raincoat. "How how?" he all but squeals, running to the edge of your little bubble and sticking his hand through the film. It goes out and gets wet. It comes in and gets dry. He takes out his phone to record it and that's what makes you snap.

"I dunno okay! Just happened." A night of sleep and comfort food helped you wake up a lot less scared of being suddenly disappeared than you were yesterday after all that research. But you still feel nervous, like the world is tilting weird. "Dunno how come also. Just happened," you say again.

"Damn cool okay!" he says, happily. "Eh want to call Che Mat and Che Din -?"

You have a feeling that he's going to squeeze as many people into the bubble as you let him get away with.

"No!" You pause. "Maybe later," you amend. Later, when it's not raining. So, much later.

"Lunch?" he says, fingers hovering over his phone screen.

Hopefully he'll forget by then. Or you'll distract him. "Maybe," you say noncommittally.

"Eat where?" he says happily.

Oh god. Why didn't you get that thing the Men in Black have? "Dunno yet oi faster walk! Don't play with phone!"

"Yes aunty," he says, looking bullied.

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The Neighbourhood Food Pandas are, as you expected, a group of aunties. It's a pot luck, which you hadn't expected - they're ladling out rice and noodles and curry chicken into a series of Tupperware containers with addresses stuck on each lid. You stow the ★★★★★ Raincoat away before you get to the house and crowd together with Ben under the umbrella, because the aunties will not (you know this with all the instinctive certainty of your heart) react like Ben did, and all the old people won't get any lunch.

It smells really good, though.

One aunty beams at you and Ben as you ring the bell, even though the gate is open. "Oh hello! Amanda, right? Right on time!" She pops a few Tupperware lids shut, running her finger around them to tighten the lids. "Three containers, then come back okay? Got a lot extra! We always make too much."

The other aunties join her in a chorus of agreements and disagreements, the way aunties always do, and you escape with Ben. You hadn't really thought there were so many old people in the place, but then your Taman (and, honestly, all the ones around for a good kilometer in every direction) are all what Pa used to call "mature estates". By which he meant that all the houses were at least forty years old and the people in them were mostly retired. You think there's enough food there to feed thirty old people, or fifteen Bens.

"Finish deliver then can go back eat right?" says Ben, holding all three containers while you pull your ★★★★★ Raincoat back on. Instantly the water on you and the umbrella rushes away, re-establishing the bubble. Ben frowns as he passes two containers back to you. "Eh like this how to read the road signs ah," he says. He has a point. Sort of.

"Google Maps," you suggest, looking for a way to hold the Tupperwares without burning your hands - the food inside them is still hot. And fragrant. "And I know where this one is anyway, it's just two roads down."

"Got car," says Ben, but he doesn't press it because he's back to playing with the bubble again, sticking his elbow out through it and watching it dry.

You roll your eyes.

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Lunch with the Friendly Food Pandas is very… well. You get introduced to them, forget all their names, and just call them all Aunty. They all remember your name but not Ben's, and they first call him your boyfriend and then your friend, unsubtle meaning evident in all their eyes. Ben remains blissfully unaware to a point that you think he has got to be doing it deliberately, gorging himself on noodles drowning in curry chicken.

Things wind down as the food diminishes. The aunties clean up by foisting Tupperware containers of leftovers on you and Ben. There's nothing much to say except that you'll see them tomorrow. They talk about continuing to do this even after the rain stops - it's fun, and it's been so long since they saw people your age around.

Yeah, you think. That's the result of living in a mature estate.

That night you pull back your curtains enough to look out on the sky. Huh. Looks like the rain's starting to lighten.

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10 SPINS AVAILABLE!

1 ROLL AVAILABLE!

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"Quarantine makes you productive" hahahaha no ;-;

Anyway, Amanda's starting to realise there's danger involved, and also is starting to make friends with the Neighbourhood Aunties, and she's starting to hit the limits of what she can learn with nothing more than Google and a UniFi broadband connection.

But as Amanda herself would tell you, Agh!

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Ben hasn't forgotten the ★★★★★ Raincoat the way you hoped he would, though he's at least refrained from posting it on Facebook, Instagram, and everywhere else he can. He totally wants you to at least let him tell the other folks in your circle of friends!

Note: you're pretty sure that he'll think weird things if he knows he's the only one who knows.
[ ] Pretend Era already knows. (But don't actually tell her.)
[ ] Pretend Era already knows. (Then tell her and only her.)
[ ] Swear him to secrecy. Only you get to tell them. (And you don't tell them.)
[ ] Swear him to secrecy. Only you get to tell them. (Then go ahead and tell them.)
[ ] Let him tell them and back him up if they ask.
[ ] Let him tell them, but pretend to know nothing about it.
[ ] Write-in.

The Friendly Food Pandas have asked you back to help. It's both fascinating and tiring…but there are things that a network of Aunties can learn and do that you can't.
[ ] Keep doing it, even after the rain stops.
[ ] Only do it until the rain stops.
[ ] This was a one-off thing. You're not going back.

You feel like you're hitting the limits of what you can find out via Google and Reddit, but you'll give it one last chance…
[ ] New post: reveal yourself as one of the mythical pink-haired people and see what comes out. You'll probably be asked to provide pictures as proof, but it's easy to mosaic your face, right?
[ ] Go to a government hospital and tell them about your pink hair. In this weather??? Hahaha no.
- [ ] Call a hospital, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
- [ ] Call a police station, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
- [ ] Call a lawyer, pretending to have a pink-haired child, and see what they say.
[ ] Write-in.

10-ROLL! Select at least three items to put in. Please select items that would plausibly exist in Amanda's home. Please also note that she no longer has a microwave, kettle, or pool floaties… though she does have a replacement comforter that she's finally getting used to the smell of.
[ ] Write-in.

Amanda's also feeling kind of uneasy ever since getting pointed to those links about possibly getting disappeared. And Ben. Ugh. Maybe her powers can be useful here…?
[ ] Amanda would like something that makes people forget her.
[ ] Amanda would like something that makes her hard to disappear.
[ ] Amanda would like something that hides her.
[ ] Amanda doesn't know what she wants.
[ ] Write-in. (Subject to QM veto. Please ask for something that makes sense.)